Lamborghini Gallardo LP560-4 Ne Plus Ultra

November 23rd, 2009

In the last ever news article on our old website we reported that on Sunday 19th July this year we attended the Grampian Transport Museum’s Motorvation event in Alford in the role of event sponsor. Motorvation serves as an annual gathering for petrolheads from across the northeast of Scotland, and always sees a nice mix of supercars and cherished classics turn up for a day of club parades and trackday fun. This year was no exception and, fortunately for us, it just so happened that we had a Lamborghini Gallardo LP560-4 in for a Ne Plus Ultra detail in the run up to the event. The owner very kindly agreed to let us take his car along as a demonstrator for our stand, and it is fair to say that it attracted a lot of attention. However, in fairness, after 110 hours of work over 10 days, we were expecting nothing less! During the course of the detail we captured over 10 hours of HD quality video footage, which we have now edited down into our first ever presentation feature. Without any further ado, we are proud to present Ne Plus Ultra the movie…

Making this feature was an eye opening experience for us, as none of us have ever worked with digital video or video editing software before, and we were anxious to do justice to the car and the work involved. After reading up and experimenting, the capturing and editing process turned out to be fairly straightforward, but then two thorny issues arose, concerning music choice and hosting arrangements. With regard to the music, we initially approach the record labels behind Muse and Kasabian to see if we could use either Super Massive Black Hole or Club Foot as the backing track, but after quotes in excess of £3500 for both we decided that royalty free music was the only cost effective way forward. Fortunately, a follower of ours on twitter kindly suggested that Music Loops holds a library of excellent royalty free tracks, and in the end we were able to pin down Cloudburst by Dan Morrissey for the final cut.

The final problem for us to resolve concerned the hosting arrangements. With the last Ne Plus Ultra write up on the forums attracting over 400,000 unique views and some pretty serious spikes in peak traffic, we knew that we needed to put in place a third party hosting scheme that could cope with this and serve as a platform for future widespread use of high quality video throughout the rest of the website. In reality, the only sensible option was to choose YouTube, as it provides an amazing array of fully customisable video publishing and management tools, plus highly robust real time streaming services. Furthermore, as a direct result of our initial trials with the new full HD capabilities that YouTube provides, we have made the bold decision to switch much of our visual content throughout the site from static images to high quality video features over the coming six to twelve months. Keep your eyes peeled!

Funny you say that, as we initially wanted to use tracks by either Muse or Kasabian, but the costs involved were horrendous so we had to hunt out a royalty free option instead. Rock seems to work well… we tried a few other ideas (pop, classical) but they were laughable, so rock it has to be from now on!

Thanks Tim; we’re over the moon that we have been able to initiate a partnership with you, and I know it made Green Jersey’s job a lot easier too. So nice for them to have great design material to work with!

WOW! I have never seen a white car shine like that! I really enjoyed watching your video, and I hope that one day I’ll be able to get a shine like half as good as that! You guys are GODS! It was posted on our site by resident detailing madman who himself is an inspiration as someone who does it simply because he enjoys it and enjoys sharing his knowledge.

Thank you Rich for your great advise on the rotary polishers over the phone, I’m not a detailer, I’m a student, but have had a go at detailing a few of my friends and relatives cars, you can see some of them my youtube link, or find me on facebook, my username on facebook is “rajiv vturbo”. Good luck for the future, RAJ.

Many thanks to everyone who has posted a comment above or called/e-mailed with positive feedback about this video. It took a huge amount of effort to put together and we are delighted that it has been received so well. In the last seven days it has been viewed more than 4,200 times, so thank you all for watching it and sharing it with your friends!

The small machine is a Meguiars G220 Dual Action Machine Polisher and in this case Clark was using it to add the final protective coat of Project Awesome (our own brand synthetic polymer paint sealant). As you can see in the video, it’s a very easy machine to use… and not just for applying liquid sealants, but also for most polishing tasks too.

Excellent video, idea and what a great job… well done guys. Wee question… is the tarpaulin down under the car when washing, so that you don’t flick road dirt up onto the car with the washer or for some other reason? All the best for 2010 and beyond guys.

Thanks very much for the kind feedback. The tarpaulin is actually an inflatable wash bund, which collects the dirty wash water as it runs off the car. After the wash stage, we pump this water into a 2500L storage tank and every few months a tanker comes along to take this waste water away for cleaning and recycling.

WOW! Very impressed and lots of green points there… I never heard of that before but completely admire you for doing it… also amazed that you have a supplier that will take it away. Anyways… thanks for the reply and quelling my nosiness.

PS – I still have a Werkstat kit from you that I bought a while ago and have been reminding myself of the whole process – your website and products are excellent… thanks!

Every car is different and requires a different amount of work, but in the case of Ne Plus Ultra details you are looking at £300 + VAT per day spent on the car (although to us a day can stretch to 14 hours plus!).